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0 pointsefitz11mo ago0 comments

This is just wrong. It was passed in 2017 (during Trump’s presidency). It was to go into effect in 2020 (a presidential election year during Trump’s presidency). He hoped to be re-elected.

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demosthanos11mo ago

No. It went into effect in 2022 [0], which means the timeline absolutely does track with OP's theory. That gives a hypothetical Trump term 2 a full year to fix it but also imposes enough of a time crunch that they could plan on sabotaging attempts to fix it by another party.

I'm not saying it's the actual story, but the timeline does track.

[0] Page 60, Sec 1306(e) sets the date: https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/hr1/BILLS-115hr1enr.pdf

efitzOP11mo ago

I don’t think it really changes the narrative. 2020 was also a congressional election year, even had Trump won (as he appeared to want desperately) he could not have been assured of a Republican congress.

My argument is simple: Occam’s Razor

The Republicans in congress put the provision in solely as a gimmick to get past the CBO.

Frankly I don’t think legislators in either party are competent enough to have foreseen the consequences and even if they had been they wouldn’t have put a bomb like this in that would be more likely than not to backfire and affect them.

I just think that too often people interpret incompetence as malice, especially nowadays when things are so polarized that it’s fashionable to hate people who differ with one’s political opinions.

throwaway17373811mo ago

I think you’re wrong that legislators are incompetent. They’re human, and they’ve spent much of their lives learning how to get votes, but they’re not incompetent. A lot of them aren’t malicious, but there seems to be a small group of people outside of the legislative branch who are hell bent on taking control at all costs. And if you want to keep the votes rolling in you have to work with those people or get primaried. The dysfunction follows from fear more than incompetence these days.

efitzOP11mo ago

I think legislators are skilled politicians and many are lawyers of varying competence. I would not expect them to deeply understand the negative downstream economic consequences of changing an obscure provision of the tax code. Maybe some of them could but would those have even been in the room? I get the impression most legislation is written by staffers (polysci or lawyers) and particularly spending legislation is tightly controlled in committee; only a handful of lawmakers ever saw the actual legislation before it was passed.

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demosthanos11mo ago

I'm not saying it's the actual story, but the timeline does track.

[0] Page 60, Sec 1306(e) sets the date: https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/hr1/BILLS-115hr1enr.pdf

efitzOP11mo ago

My argument is simple: Occam’s Razor

The Republicans in congress put the provision in solely as a gimmick to get past the CBO.

throwaway17373811mo ago

efitzOP11mo ago

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